Museumsufer Fest

This is the biggest and last of the Frankfurt Summer Street festivals. And it's completely unlike any street festival I've ever actually seen. In Chicago, people walk around drinking beer from plastic cups in baseball caps and shorts, it's really only a group of 20-somethings and 30-somethings heading out to get drunk for the afternoon (or often although you can do lots of other fun things too), somehow it seems kind of dirty and crowded and overwhelming . . . In Frankfurt, people walk around in such an orderly fashion drinking wine and beer out of actual glasses (glass glasses! no plastic cups here, folks!). Old couples, young couples, couples with kids, teenagers in summer romances, you name it they're here and they're here until the early hours of the morning. No one bats an eye at little kids wandering around because everyone is so well behaved.

Music is playing in the gardens behind the museums but if you make your way down to the riverside you find stages with club music and dancers (scantily dressed dancers) going until the earliest hours of the morning. It's great. Somehow civilized and yet like a club all at once.

My friend Francesca took me out to the festival and we spent an hour or two wandering around the booths, I managed to get a wooden ring stuck on my finger (for a full 30 minutes mind you, the guy used both oil and dish soap to get the thing off my hand). It was great. Really gorgeous jewelry and decorations from Columbia to South Africa (some of it was the usual tourist junk, but there were some amazing finds if you spent enough time looking).

It makes me sad that I didn't make it out to more of the festivals this summer, but there's always next year!